This invention relates to amplifiers and more particularly to amplifiers that include a nonlinear load.
Amplifiers, such as linear amplifiers having multiple linear gain stages, are used to process signals. These amplifiers perform two important tasks. First, they increase the amplitude of some frequency components of the original signal contained in the received signal. Second, they decrease the amplitude of other frequency components (sometimes noise frequencies) contained in the received signal. For signal transmission systems that process low speed digital signals, these amplifiers perform adequately. However, to successfully process high speed digital signals, such as those used in modern information processing and communication systems, amplifiers must have a large gain-bandwidth product. Unfortunately, linear amplifiers having multiple stages often do not have a sufficiently large gain-bandwidth product to process the signals used in high speed digital systems.